Stump, Gregory

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University of KentuckyUKnowledgeEnglish Faculty Publications English6-2015Kayardild morphology and syntax, by Erich R. Round(Review)Gregory StumpUniversity of Kentucky, gregory.stump@uky.eduRight click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_facpubPart of the English Language and Literature CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in English FacultyPublications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact UKnowledge@lsv.uky.edu.Repository CitationStump, Gregory, "Kayardild morphology and syntax, by Erich R. Round (Review)" (2015). English Faculty Publications. 2.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_facpub/2Kayardild morphology and syntax, by Erich R. Round (Review)Notes/Citation InformationPublished in Language, v. 91, no. 2, p. 497-500.Printed with the permission of Gregory Stump. © 2015.The copyright holders have granted the permission for posting the article here.This book review is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_facpub/2ponents of language might have developed gradually. And Merge itself needs to be restricted invarious ways, since there are conditions on what can merge with what. These conditions couldwell have appeared gradually over evolutionary or historical time.To summarize, The origins of language: A slim guide is an outstanding work. James R. Hurfordis to be congratulated for writing what is uncontestably the best general introduction to the issuessurrounding language origins and evolution.REFERENCESBerwick, Robert C. 1997. Syntax facit saltum: Computation and the genotype and phenotype of language.Journal of Neurolinguistics 10.231–49.Clark, Brady. 2013. Syntactic theory and the evolution of syntax. Biolinguistics 7.169–97.Hauser, Marc D.; Noam Chomsky; and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: What is it,who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298.1569–79.Hurford, James R. 1989. Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the languageacquisition device. Lingua 77.187–222.Hurford, James R. 2007. The origins of meaning: Language in the light of evolution. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Hurford, James R. 2012. The origins of grammar: Language in the light of evolution. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Jackendoff, Ray. 2010. Your theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language. Theevolution of human language: Biolinguistic perspectives, ed. by Richard K. Larson, Viviane Déprez,and Hiroko Yamakido, 63–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.1068 Seymour St.Vancouver, BC V6B 3M6, Canada[fjn@u.washington.edu]Kayardild morphology and syntax. By Erich R. Round. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2013. Pp. xix, 295. ISBN 9780199654871. $135 (Hb).Reviewed by Gregory Stump, University of KentuckySince its introduction by Aronoff (1994), the concept of the morphome has had profound ef-fects on the field of morphology. Once one acknowledges that a language’s morphology may besensitive to properties, categories, and patterns to which the rest of its grammar is simply blind,one is naturally inclined (or more inclined) to think of morphology as an autonomous grammati-cal component. Formerly tolerated as pesky anomalies, morphomic phenomena now invite closerexamination for the insight they give into the organization of a language’s morphology—and theydo so pervasively.In Kayardild morphology and syntax, Erich Round discusses a system of morphosyntax that, inhis words, ‘provides the clearest example yet of a linguistically significant morphomic level ofrepresentation, in the sense that a significant range of generalizations are accorded their simplestand most elegant expression in terms of the same, morphomically represented units’ (38). Theanalysis that R proposes for Kayardild morphosyntax provides convincing support for this claim;in particular, his analysis provides a systematic account of the fact that, repeatedly in Kayardild,a heterogeneous set of morphosyntactic feature values is realized by precisely the same inflec-tional morphology (for example, the locative case, the TAM (tense/aspect/modality) properties‘instantiated’, ‘present’, and ‘immediate’, the clausal property of complementization, and the der-ivation of place names are all independently subsumed by a morphome ‘μloc’ whose realizationis the suffix -ki).Kayardild is doubly remarkable for the intricate system of syntax in which such morphomes dotheir work. R argues that the distribution of morphosyntactic feature values in Kayardild syntac-tic structure is most cleanly definable not with respect to sentences’ superficial constituent struc-REVIEWS 497Printed with the permission of Gregory Stump. © 2015.ture, but with respect to richly layered ‘nonsurface’ structures from which superficial syntax maybe projected. In his analysis, these layers are motivated primarily by the notion of concord—‘[t]he morphological realization, on multiple words dominated by a syntactic node n, of a mor-phosyntactic feature value associated with n’ (76). In accordance with this notion, nonsurfacesyntactic structures are postulated in which each phrasal node may serve as the initial attachmentsite from which a morphosyntactic feature value v percolates to word forms whose morphologyexpresses v; the nesting of a nonsurface structure’s phrasal constituents therefore reflects the nest-ing of morphosyntactic feature values’ domains of concord. The inflection of a given word formmay therefore involve the morphological realization of morphosyntactic feature values inheritedfrom several dominating nodes, of greater or lesser hierarchical proximity; indeed, a word formmay even inflect for contrasting values of the same feature.Kayardild has an unusually elaborate system of morphosyntactic features, whose values them-selves vary with respect to their attachment sites. Thus, whether the word forms in a DP inflectfor a morphosyntactic feature value v depends on whether that DP is dominated by v’s attachmentsite. Although the percolation of feature values cannot cross the maximal clausal node S″, a fea-ture value originating in a matrix clause may, for example, percolate into an embedded VP. Thus,given a feature whose value v1 has a matrix attachment site X and whose value v2 has an embed-ded attachment site Y, the percolation of these values relative to a DP contained in an embeddedVP node Z may have four logically possible outcomes: DP may inherit v1 but not v2 (if Z is dom-inated by X but not Y); v2 but not v1 (if Z is dominated by Y but not X); both v1 and v2 (if Z isdominated by both X and Y); or neither v1 nor v2 (if Z is dominated by neither X nor Y). Thisis precisely what happens in the morphosyntax of the feature tama (‘athematic tense/aspect/mood’), a fact predicted by the nonsurface structure that R proposes for Kayardild sentences(118ff.). Because of both the variety of attachment sites for values of tama and the complex waysin which the inflectional realization of these values is morphomically conflated with that of otherfeature values, the morphosyntax of the feature tama is exceptionally intricate; R accordingly in-cludes an extensive appendix (260–77) categorizing the distributional possibilities of tama val-ues and exemplifying their realization with dozens of glossed examples.R’s syntactic analysis interlocks with a precise account of Kayardild inflectional morphology(215ff.). This account is executed in the context of a grammatical architecture in which inflec-tional realization involves three levels of representation for an inflected word form: at the mor-phosyntactic level Σ, a word form’s representation specifies the morphosyntactic propertiesdirectly pertinent to its syntax and interpretation; at the morphomic level M, its representationspecifies the morphomes that determine its morphological realization; and at the phonologicallevel Φ, its representation specifies its (underlying) phonological form. (In accordance with thisview of Kayardild morphology, R’s glossed examples have three levels of representation—phonological, morphosyntactic, and morphomic—rather than the usual two.)The architecture assumed for inflectional morphology entails two mappings: the ΣM mappingand the MΦ mapping. The definition of these two mappings is mediated by a set of rankedoptimality-theoretic constraints and by a constraint of ‘lexical grounding’, according to whicheach mapping depends on a lexicon of input-output pairings—pairings of morphosyntactic fea-ture values with morphomic values for the ΣM mapping, and pairings of morphomic values withmorphs for the MΦ mapping.In R’s analysis, the inflectional realization of a Kayardild word form’s feature content dependson the assumption that feature values are at least partially ordered. This ordering arises in twoways—partly as an effect of the definition of the percolation relation in syntax, and partly as aneffect of purely morphological constraints on linearization. R argues that the definition of perco-lation must play a role in the ordering of feature values because the hierarchical relations amongfeature values’ attachment sites are sometimes mirrored by the linear ordering of those featurevalues’ exponents; at the same time, purely morphological constraints must also be relevant,since this sort of mirroring is not always in evidence, and is indeed sometimes overridden. Be-sides determining the ordering relation among certain feature values (and hence among their ex-ponents), syntactic structure has a second important effect on inflectional realization, in thatcertain syntactic configurations serve to establish a relation of ‘antagonism’ between particular498 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 91, NUMBER 2 (2015)morphosyntactic features—a relation entailing that the inflectional realization of one feature ex-cludes that of the other (169ff.).R’s three-tiered conception of a language’s inflectional morphology (constraint-based realiza-tional morphology—CBRM) is in some ways reminiscent of the paradigm-linkage (PL) approachto inflection advocated in Stump 2002, 2006, Stewart & Stump 2007, and subsequent work.1 Inthis approach, the correspondence relation between content paradigms and form paradigmsequates to the ΣM mapping, and the inflectional expression of form paradigms as realized para-digms constitutes the MΦ mapping. The ΣM lexicon in CBRM may be seen as an extensionaldefinition of the property mapping between content cells and form cells in the PL approach; andthe MΦ lexicon is at least loosely comparable to a language’s rules of inflectional exponence inthe PL approach.Although these two approaches to inflectional morphology are both formal interpretations ofAronovian morphomics, they differ in key respects. The overarching difference is that in CBRM,morphotactic relations embody the optimal satisfaction of a set of ranked constraints; in the PLapproach, by contrast, they follow from the definition of a language’s paradigm function. TheCBRM and PL approaches are also distinguished by numerous lower-level choices of executionwhose relative merits remain to be weighed.In the PL approach, for example, morphosyntactic property sets are invariably unordered, butmay exhibit the sort of nesting defined by Anderson’s layering principle (1992:94ff.); R’s analy-sis of Kayardild therefore raises the question of whether feature layering and feature ordering aresimply notational variants, and if not, whether both are necessary, and if not, whether one deviceshould be preferred over the other.The ΣM and MΦ lexicons invoked in defining the ΣM and MΦmappings raise other questions.In the PL approach, the cognate mappings are formulated to take full account of lexical condi-tioning (e.g. by inflection-class differences) and of the possibility of nonconcatenative expo-nence. It is not immediately clear, however, how the ΣM and MΦ lexicons might be squared witheither phenomenon. Neither one seems to play a central role in the morphology of Kayardild,suggesting that the comparative evaluation of the CBRM and PL approaches will ultimately de-pend on morphological phenomena proper to languages that are typologically rather differentfrom Kayardild.That said, it is amply clear that CBRM affords an exceptionally precise account of Kayardildconcord and the morphomic inflection that expresses it. Kayardild morphology and syntax ac-cordingly deserves the careful attention of at least two audiences. It will surely attract wide inter-est among Australianists; R’s meticulous account of Kayardild’s intricate morphosyntax isremarkable both for its detail and for its theoretical sophistication, and will surely suggest newways of analyzing similar phenomena in other, related languages. Readers will appreciate theconsiderable pains that R has taken to identify the exact points of similarity and contrast betweenhis analyses and those proposed in Nicholas Evans’s (1995) landmarkGrammar of Kayardild; forexample, he includes an appendix explicitly listing the correspondences between the features andvalues assumed in his and Evans’s analyses (256–59).Morphologists, the other major audience for R’s book, should devote particular attention to R’sanalysis of Kayardild for its rigorous and extensive application of the morphome concept. Itdemonstrates that the most explanatory account of Kayardild inflectional morphology demandsthe postulation of a level of pure morphology mediating between word forms’ morphosyntacticrepresentations and their inflectional realization; in so doing, it points the way to new possibilitiesfor the analysis of languages worldwide.REFERENCESAnderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Aronoff, Mark. 1994.Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Evans, Nicholas. 1995. A grammar of Kayardild: With historical-comparative notes on Tangkic. Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter.REVIEWS 4991 See likewise O’Neill (2013a,b), who proposes a similar three-tiered approach.O’Neill, Paul. 2013a. The morphome and morphosyntactic/semantic features. The boundaries of pure mor-phology: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives, ed. by Silvio Cruschina, Martin Maiden, and JohnCharles Smith, 221–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.O’Neill, Paul. 2013b. The notion of the morphome.Morphological autonomy: Perspectives from Romanceinflectional morphology, by Maria Goldbach, Martin Maiden, and John Charles Smith, 70–94. Oxford:Oxford University Press.Stewart, Tom, and Gregory Stump. 2007. Paradigm function morphology and the morphology/syntax in-terface. The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, ed. by Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss, 383–421. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Stump, Gregory. 2002. Morphological and syntactic paradigms: Arguments for a theory of paradigm link-age. Yearbook of Morphology 2001.147–80.Stump, Gregory. 2006. Heteroclisis and paradigm linkage. Language 82.279–322.Department of EnglishUniversity of Kentucky1215 Patterson Office TowerLexington, KY 40506-0027[gstump@uky.edu]Rightward movement in a comparative perspective. Ed. by Gert Webelhuth,Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 200.)Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. viii, 476. ISBN 9789027255839. $158(Hb).Reviewed byMichael S. Rochemont, University of British ColumbiaRightward movement in a comparative perspective is a useful and wide-ranging collection ofpapers on constructions that patently display rightward movement, though one of the major is-sues that arises in discussion of such cases, and no less so in this book, is whether they involve‘movement’ at all. Indeed, when syntacticians speak of rightward movement they speakmetaphorically, since even syntacticians who believe in literal movement do not believe that allnonadjacent dependent relations from the right must involve movement. In fact, at least somerightward movement configurations are generally agreed not to involve movement of a dislocatedand rightward-positioned dependent phrase at all (e.g. English relative clause extraposition).It is fitting that this title appears in John Benjamins’s ‘Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today’ se-ries, following on from Rightward movement (Beermann, LeBlanc, & van Riemsdijk 1997). Thepresent volume’s perspective is comparative in several ways: theoretical (different frameworks),empirical (different types of data: corpus-based, experimental, reported grammaticality judg-ments), and crosslinguistic (different languages and language families). In addition, the chaptersoverall compare different motivational sources for rightward movement (processing/parsing,syntax, prosodic phonology, or some combination thereof ). The book is enhanced by a compre-hensive and compelling introduction by the editors that makes a contribution to the study of right-ward movement configurations in its own right. This introduction gives an overview of theanalytical challenges that characterize rightward movement configurations in general and relativeclause extraposition in particular, and critically surveys existing proposals, including those to befound in the papers that follow in the book. Among the descriptive and explanatory issues thatarise are: (i) construal (how does the rightward-positioned dependent constituent recover thoseaspects of its interpretation that are dependent on a leftward-situated nonadjacent position orhost?); (ii) locality/boundedness (what is the source of the varying boundedness effects that gov-ern the relation between the rightward-positioned dependent phrase and its dependent host posi-tion, and why do these differ across constructions?); (iii) whether a uniform account of (subsetsof) rightward movement configurations is at all possible; (iv) why it is just the constructions so500 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 91, NUMBER 2 (2015)Printed with the permission of Michael S. Rochemont. © 2015.

\u3cem\u3eKayardild morphology and syntax\u3c/em\u3e, by Erich R. Round (Review)

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\u3cem\u3eKayardild morphology and syntax\u3c/em\u3e, by Erich R. Round (Review)

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